Downvoting is critical but can be put in the wrong hands and be used inappropriately. This has been mention before here: Change rep required to downvote on MSE. The current best answer agrees and says the limit should go down to 101, where the association bonus, which I do agree accept that you only have 1 answer downvote.
My suggestion that you get to vote the second you arrive to SE or at least get to upvote privilege and earn the downvote privilege as well. There are many users who want to participate in discussions and other sorts of questions. For discussions, you should be able to vote when you reach 5 rep, the rest of the questions when you reach enough rep to upvote.
Even better, change both upvote and downvote limits to 10, which means a decrease of 5 rep for upvotes and a change of 115 for downvotes. That may seem a lot but everyone should be able to join in to discuss with all the others, when they seem to know how this site works. This means that everyone that has an association bonus will have plenty of votes to use and new users won't struggle just to gain their rights to participate in discussions.
